So, Boeing is making noises about moving to some cheaper place. Some thoughts:
This is the kind of eyewash corporations deploy before executing plans (to move) that have been in the works for years. It causes the victims to blame themselves instead looking at the perfidy of the companies. Odds are Boeing has already scouted out where they plan to move — and it’s probably to some Third World rat hole, not some low-cost state like, say, Alabama.
We’ve become too much the one-company town. It’s like the old saying: If you owe the bank $1,000, you’ve got a problem; if you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has a problem. The threat to move is naked extortion. It’s economic terrorism, and do we negotiate with terrorists?
This kind of thing — a mono-focus on cutting costs — is what companies do when they’re on the greasy slide to nowhere. After all, rail is making a comeback (who but first classers can stand to fly in the cattle cars airplanes have become) and they’ve outsourced so much of their key technologies to foreign interests that these suppliers will soon combine, form a new mega-corporation, and eat Boeing’s lunch.
The Puget Sound area is over-populated. If Boeing moves, it will reduce the pressures on the County Council to expand, expand, expand. If Boeing moves, real estate will become less bloated, the roads less congested. Fewer people mean fewer schools, fewer cops and firefighters, less wear and tear on the roads, utilities, etc.
What, oh, what will we do with the big building in Everett if Boeing moves to Brazil? Well, I bet we could sell it to Airbus, or maybe Tupolev.
I say let Boeing move. And good riddance.
Tom LaBelle
Clearview
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